Parents in Lafayette, Tennessee have been protesting the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance club at Macon County High School — but it seems their real problem is that the school’s Christian clubs aren’t receiving the priority treatment they want.

According to the Macon County Times, students at the school have expressed interest in forming a GSA, but aren’t having luck in finding a faculty sponsor. The school’s Principal, Stephanie Meador, told the county’s Board of Education last week that there is no “special treatment” at play for the club whatsoever. In fact, it remains to be seen whether the club will actually get off the ground at all without an advisor.

The summer before Sara Sheppard began her senior year of high school in Katy, Texas, she took an Economics class. Her teacher was well-liked by the students but Sara noticed that he spent a lot of time talking about Christianity in the classroom:

As the semester went by I realized that his passion for passing on his knowledge was not focused on economics but focused on religion, prayer, and spirituality. Instead of teaching economics he would teach us that certain historical people were among the greatest because of their spiritual enlightenment. He also expressed to the students that it was human nature to have a spiritual and religious component, therefore making atheists unnatural and against human nature. This teacher went so far with this idea to even compare atheism to smoking and how the body originally rejects smoking just like “the mind rejects the concept of atheism.”

Even though she called him out on that last statement, explaining that he shouldn’t say things like that in the classroom, it didn’t change anything.

Reporting his conduct didn’t seem like a safe option — it could have made her a target of students and other teachers. So Sara did the next best thing.

Two head teachers at a Scottish primary school who allowed members of a US creationist Christian religious sect into classrooms have been removed from their posts, it emerged last night. Headteacher Alexandra MacKenzie and her deputy Elizabeth Mockus — who job-share at Kirktonholme Primary School in East Kilbride — are to be “redeployed” to backroom duties while South Lanarkshire Council carries out an investigation. … Education chiefs want to determine why the Church of Christ sect had been allowed into the school to work as classroom assistants for the last eight years.

For 18 years, Kristen Ostendorf worked as a teacher at Totino-Grace High School in Minnesota in relative silence: she didn’t tell anyone that she is gay. But after she finally came out to her colleagues last month, her work at the Catholic school immediately came to an end.

43-year-old Ostendorf told the MinnPost that during a workshop of 120 teachers in late August, she blurted out, “I’m gay, I’m in a relationship with a woman, and I’m happy.” The next day she was asked to resign, having broken the Catholic school’s code of conduct barring any public speech or actions that contradict the Church’s teachings. When she refused, she was promptly fired.

Maybe they could’ve gotten away with that — other public schools have held cermonies in similar places — but the event’s program didn’t even attempt to shy away from promoting Christianity, listing two separate prayers:

As I wrote then, “school officials didn’t just cross the line. They destroyed the line and then prayed to Jesus to patch it back up.”

The American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center sent the district a letter warning them of the consequences of continuing future ceremonies in the same location with these prayers.

The district responded the next day, but failed to say how they would change their plans for the future:

With regard to the prayers given at the program by students of Mountain View Elementary School, the District can assure you that the school will not endorse the use of prayer by students at any awards program or school-sponsored event in the future.

That’s legalese for “We won’t publicly admit that we support the students, but we’re not going to stop the Christian prayers.”

In fact, a school official asked a student to deliver the first prayer. And the closing prayer, also recited by a student, was this: